TORCH (Time Out, Reality Check)

TORCH (Time Out, Reality Check) is a VAV practice that interrupts a speaker’s adoption of an abuser’s account and redirects attention to the speaker’s own reality. Its force lies in making that correction public and repeatable: the same check Soo-Lin Lee-Segal applies to Elgin Branch’s description of his marriage also becomes a way for her to examine her own part in their relationship.

Definition and Purpose

Soo-Lin explains that at VAV, a speaker who slips into an abuser’s story may be interrupted by someone calling for a time out and reality check. The practice is intended to help participants distinguish their own reality from that imposed account, a distinction she describes as the first step toward stopping an abuse cycle. VAV’s definition of abuse is deliberately broad and oriented toward esteem; Soo-Lin presents participants as moving beyond victimhood rather than making victimhood their sole identity.

Soo-Lin’s Intervention with Elgin

During a staff meeting, Soo-Lin notices that Elgin seems distracted and asks whether everything is all right. He says he is questioning his sanity because of problems at home. Soo-Lin responds that if he told his stories about Bernadette Fox at a VAV meeting, he would be interrupted by TORCH. She applies the practice directly to his situation, contrasting his professional success and his daughter’s academic progress despite several heart surgeries with the difficulties he describes at home. Elgin thanks her but says he needs to concentrate and will read her message more carefully after the meeting. The exchange shows TORCH operating not just as a general meeting rule but as a pointed challenge to the story Elgin is telling himself about his circumstances.

Self-Examination and Accountability

Soo-Lin later reports that she herself was TORCHed at VAV and must complete and read a WYP, or Write Your Part, inventory before returning. In her account of her working relationship with Elgin, she describes the early pattern of his asking for the impossible, her making it happen, and his praise of her work. Her reality check then corrects the implication that the feeling was mutual: she identifies herself, rather than Elgin, as the one falling in love. She also recognizes that when Elgin confided in her about Bernadette, she could have politely ended the conversation, even though their children’s shared school had already blurred the boundary between work and personal life. TORCH thus turns the same scrutiny toward the person who has benefited from applying it to someone else.

Role in the Narrative

The practice gives the exchanges a formal structure: an interpretation can be interrupted, named as an interpretation, and revised. In Soo-Lin’s account, that structure first challenges Elgin’s framing of his home life, then exposes a difference between her feelings and what she had assumed about his. TORCH’s significance is therefore not simply that it assigns a label to a difficult relationship; it also requires the speaker to distinguish what they experienced from what they inferred and to acknowledge choices within their own account.